UK politics

Mandy and Georgie sinking in a yacht, b.i.t.c.h.i.n.g.

Life under Capitalism, UK politics
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You could smeel the relief in the papers the past week, when little Georgie Osborne challenged Lord Mandy to a bitchslap. Fun politics again, hot gossip and dodgy Russian billionaires and sundrenched yachts on exotic Greek islands: much more interesting than this boring old credit crisis turned recession that’s bringing everybody down in the whole world and you actually have to know too much about to write about it. Dangle a sausage of juicy innuendo in front of the British media and they’ll happily ignore everything else that’s going: perfect timing, now even Gordon has to admit Britain is sliding towards recession –“ending the era of boom and bust” indeed.

In the end it doesn’t matter whether little George or Mandy was right, whether George wanted fifty thousand pound or not. The real scandal is the shadow chancellor and the European Commissioner for Trade palling around not just with an at the very least somewhat dodgy Russian oligarch but also the heir to the
quintessential banking fortune. Yes, any party with asperations towards government in any western country has to be pals on one level or another with the real owners of the world, the ultrarich men and women who don’t care who rules the plebs, as long as their fortunes are safe, but to do it this blatantly?

This is one of those fights in which you wish all the participants would lose, but how much of this was choreographed from the start, what with Rothschild and Osborne being such old friends and all? Or is this just a long simmering inferiority complex coming to the fore, Osborne doing something stupid as telling on Mandelson because he’s jealous of the easy way Mandy gets easy acces to the dinner table
when he has to beg for the scraps? On Have I Got News For You Friday nigth they described the initiation rite Osborne had to go through at the Bullington Club was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: “What are you?” They said the answer was “I’m despicable”, but that was not quite it, as another gossipmonger disguised as journalist, Marina Hyde revealed. It was actually “I am a despicable cunt”. Not to play the armchair psychologist here, but that sort of thing must smart.

In a month when governments frantically pumped money into the financial system, capitalism’s heartland and talked tough about better and stronger regulation and an end to the greed and bonus culture in the City, this affair showed crystal clear where the real power still lies. It was best shown in the way Rothschild warned Osbornewhen the latter went on to deny the allegations against him:

Nat Rothschild, the merchant banker who accused shadow chancellor George Osborne of soliciting a £50,000 donation from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, has warned he will destroy Osborne if the Tories continue to question his account of the discussions that took place at his villa on Corfu.

Declaring a form of uneasy truce, friends of Rothschild said he did not at this stage want to escalate the public battle with his old friend. They said Rothschild had not intended to bring Osborne down by disclosing the shadow chancellor’s involvement in talks about
raising money from Deripaska. Instead, the friends said, Rothschild had intended it as a “slap on the wrist” because he was furious
that Osborne had breached confidences in an attempt to damage Labour business secretary Lord Mandelson.

If that isn’t the voice of naked command, nothing is. “You boys can go on playing your little games, as long as you don’t bother us. But if you do, we’ll crush you effortlessly”. Osborne seemed to have gotten the hint, but I wouldn’t be too cocky if I were Rothschild. In this bourgeoisised world such blatant reminders of the old class system are not appreciated; even the queen has to “dress down” so to speak. Tories like Osborne can nurse a grudge as well and the political climate is ripe for a bit of populist rabble rousing…

But what about Fatty Soames?

class war, Tories
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Fatty Soames

Yes, we could respond to the Tories scolding the fatties by pointing out that the link between obesity and health is not at all as clearcut as the moral panics make it out to be, that being fat is not just a question of being greedy, but of having access to good, affordable food, not to mention the time and ability to prepare it, that we’re being sold food that’s slowly killing us by one arm of a multinational company like Mars or Unilever while another arm is selling us dieting panaceas, but really all we need to do is point to Nicholas “Fatty” Soames, the Tory posterboy for self-satisfied gluttony, of whom it has been said having sex with him is like having a wardrobe falling on you with the key sticking out. Fat is good as long as it wears a bespoke suit, not tracky bottoms.

Boycott the 2012 Olympics

UK politics, War on Terror
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Yesterday the handoff of the Olympic flame from one repressive regime to another went smoothly. While China ended its Olympics with an impressive display of old skool mass drill, Britain opted for a more modern theme, showcasing a celebrity front against a background of aspiring –and cheap– student dancers and the like. The level of drilling needed for Britain’s eight minute presentation is of course of the same level as that of China, just appearing more relaxed. It’s a good metaphor for the differences in approach to politics in the two states, the Chinese still having a no-nonsense, heavyhanded style of dealing with dissent, while the British offer authoritarianism with the fake smile of the Argos salesperson desparate to meet his target. However the two countries are converging in their approaches, as Alex discusses:

It’s so familiar; the insistence that anyone who disagrees is doing so out of spite, that only acquiescence is “serious” or “helpful”. I’m surprised he didn’t offer them a Big Conversation, but in fact, with the right mistranslation he might have done. Similarly, the re-education through labour order for disturbing the public is just a translator’s caprice away from an anti-social behaviour order.

Perhaps there’s a wider truth here; this sort of events/urban regeneration politics seems to follow the same grammar all over the world. It’s conceived of as a project; which implies there are only participants, or else obstructions. Despite the money and the bulldozers, it respects
class boundaries; veering around the villas of the rich. It needs special security arrangements which always turn out to involve some sort of summary justice based on vague and unchallengeable notions of appropriateness, propriety, or order; similarly, these are always temporary but are never revoked. The state authorities and private interests involved are indistinguishable. (Interestingly, the legislative foundation tends to be very hard to get rid of; the Act on the Great Exhibition of 1851 is still in force and still a major headache for anyone planning to build on or near the original site.)

We saw how ruthless China dealt with everything that threatened to disrupt the Olympics, from smog to Free Tibet protests, it will be interesting to see how the British authorities do. They’ll have an easier time of it of course, because the western media aren’t already inclined to be hostile to them in the way they are to the proven “totalitarian” regime in power in China. Britain after all is still a democratic country Unfortunately, as Jamie wryly noted, China is actually liberalising slowly while Britain is going the other way, recognising each other as they pass.

Britain these days is a country where you can be arrested and sentenced not for being a terrorist, not for helping terrorists but just for writing poetry “glorifying terrorism and where innocent Brazilian electricians can be murdered by the police in broad daylight with his killers escaping justice. Let’s not even talk about the warcrimes the country is involved in abroad, in Afghanistan and Iraq. At least China isn’t involved in hanging on the coattails of dodgy American imperialistic ventures…

Plenty of reasons to boycott the 2012 Olympics as effectively as y’all did the 2008 ones, no?

It isn’t terrorism if you’re white, part XXXVIII

UK politics, War on Terror
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Last Wednesday I blogged the case of the socalled lyrical terrorist, who had her conviction for “storing material likely to be of use to terrorists” quashed; the material in question being some fairly ropey, anarchist cookbook style “terrorism manuals”. It was another in a long line of dodgy anti-terrorism prosecutions, with lots of media attention and lots of government hype, not justified by the endresults. Every so often another supposed terrorism plot is uncovered, a serious threat averted and it always turn out to be either be no-hoper wannabe-jihadists with no links to real terrorists, mentally disturbed fantasists or just innocent people looking a little bit too Muslim for the Metropolitian Police.

If the suspects are white however, it’s another matter. Remember the terrorism case in Burnley two years ago? Probably not, as apart from some mentions in the local paper, few newspapers or news shows deigned to pay attention to it, despite the fact that the people involved had massed a huge arsenal of weapons and such and were talking about the coming racewar. Unlike the heavy-handed prosecution of Muslim terrorism suspects, the government kept quiet about this case, didn’t whip the tabloids in a feeding frenzy and let the courts do their job. Last Friday, there was another such case, as a Goole Nazi sympathiser went on trial for making nail bombs, amongst other offences:

A Nazi sympathiser charged with terrorism offences after nail bombs were found at his East Yorkshire home has told a court that he made the devices when he was “just sat around bored”.

A jury at Leeds Crown Court heard how police found four home-made nail bombs in a holdall under a bed in 31-year-old Martyn Gilleard’s flat in Goole.

Officers also found “potentially lethal” bladed weapons, 34 bullets for a 2.2 calibre firearm and documents about committing terrorism, including how to make a bomb and how to poison someone to death.

Again, little attention has been paid to this trial, a Google news search finding less than twenty news articles on the subject, but you can imagine the hue and cry had this been a Muslim suspect. It’s not that I want the same hysteria for this case, it’s just that it’s so blatantly obvious how the British government atttempts to create a narrative about terrorism, by spotlighting those cases, no matter how weak, that fit the War on Terror and keeping quiet about those that do not. It’s easy enough to get the media to cooperate on this, as journalists, not to mention their editors, are lazy and under constant deadline pressure; few go out looking for stories that don’t fit pre-determined templates.

Brown bottles out

Nu Labour, UK politics
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The question has been doing the rounds for weeks now: will he or won’t he? Today the answer came: he won’t. Brown won’t call for an early election:

Mr Brown told the BBC he had had a “duty” to consider whether to hold an election, but decided against it so he could show his “vision” for Britain.

[…]

He denied the opinion polls had led to the decision not to hold an election, saying: “I have a vision for change in Britain and I want to show people how in government we’re implementing it.”

Pressed on the decision, Mr Brown said that the series of crises since he became PM in June meant “the easiest thing I could have done is call an election. I could have called an election on competence”.

He added: “We would win an election, in my view, whether we had it today, next week or weeks after.”

But, he said: “I want the chance in the next phase of my premiership to develop and show people the policies that are going to make a huge difference and make a change in the whole country itself.”

That’s typically New Labour, to always talk as if they’ve just come into power, to ignore their own history. It’s always new policies, more change, new approaches, new opportunities for the people of Britain, as if the past ten years of Labour governments never happened and the Tories have just been ousted from power. This way their own mistakes and failed policies are swept under the carpet, while keeping the momentum of a new government. Having an early election would be part of that process, if Brown had been confident he could’ve won and won convincingly. But he bottled out and now he’s going to recreate this momentum the oldfashioned New Labour way: with lots and lots of new, improved, not very well thought out policies.

However, none of this changes one very important fact: that Brown has become the prime minister of Britain without ever having had a mandate from the voters.